This week Google launched Sidewiki, a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page. This tool has some interesting uses. It also has some serious implications that have web masters worried.

Sidewiki merits

If it succeeds, Google Sidewiki could be a useful tool to add perspective to any web site, a channel for independent commentaries on any content, commentaries that cannot be deleted by e.g. a blog editor.

Annotating the Web adds a dimension to web surfing that has already proven useful in research and teaching — collaborative browsing. There are many tools available that enable you to comment on or annotate web pages.

So what Google Sidewiki does is not new.

You have to have Google Toolbar installed to use the Sidewiki. Still, none of the existing competitors to Google Sidewiki have a pre-established user base anywhere in the vicinity of the Google Toolbar’s. Sidewiki is the first of these tools that has a chance of reaching critical mass: With enough users, enough content could be produced and there could be educating discussions in the Sidewikis of many of the most visited sites on the web and for many of the most contested subjects.

The dark side of Sidewiki

If it doesn’t reach critical mass, Google Sidewiki is likely to become the domain of spammers, as was the case with Third Voice ten years ago.

According to Danny Sullivan, Google (NSDQ:GOOG) has set up counter measures: A quality threshold will (hopefully) make comments of little value disappear.

While Sidewiki might prove to be a useful addition to many regular web pages, bloggers like Jeff Jarvis are angry:

“Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me.”

Google is sometimes too zealous in their quest to control information and in the case of Sidewiki there ought to have been an opt-in option or, in the very least an opt-out option for web site owners who already have valuable discussions on their web sites.

Web site owners have other qualms concerning Google Sidewiki: There is no easy way for me to monitor the Sidewiki debate on my web sites. If I have claimed ownership of my site at Google Webmaster Central, I can write a special entry on any of my pages that will remain the top entry for this page.

What I need to keep on top of the comments and debates on my sites and the buzz about my brand is:

• The choice to be notified whenever someone enters a Google Sidewiki comment on my site
• A way to search all Sidewiki entries for mentions of my brand (or any other search term for that matter)
• RSS feed from any page’s Sidewiki

For a quick intro to Google Sidewiki, have a look at this video.